Rector and Vice Rectors
Jari Ojala is a professor of comparative business history at the Ä¢¹½Ö±²¥. He has worked as the dean of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences (2022–2023), vice dean for research (2018–2021) and the head of the Department of History and Ethnology (2008–2017). He is a researcher with extensive international networks and has served in various international assessment duties and as the editor of two international scientific journals.
He has led several extensive projects with supplementary funding – the amount of project funding totalling nearly €7.5 million. He has almost three hundred scientific publications to his name. For example, he is part of the research group that has written the most downloaded article in the history of the distinguished journal Business History.
Before the vice-rectorship, she worked for the Ä¢¹½Ö±²¥ as a professor of early childhood education, especially child and developmental psychology, and as the dean of the Faculty of Education and Psychology from 2006.
Laakso has worked as a researcher in the Finnish Centre of Excellence ‘Human Development and Its Risk Factors’, and as a postdoctoral researcher funded by the Academy of Finland. She has also led and worked in several research projects with supplementary funding. The projects led by Laakso have, for example, developed methods for assessing children’s prelinguistic skills, supporting their social and emotional skills, and supporting parents who bring up children with hyperactivity and attention deficit disorder. These methods are still used in child welfare and family clinics, early childhood education and therapy work.
Professor Kaisa Miettinen leads research and doctoral education at JYU.
Kaisa Miettinen (PhD) has worked at JYU since 2007 as professor of industrial optimisation in the Faculty of Information Technology. Her research includes multiobjective optimisation, decision analytics and support for decision-making. Between 2012 and 2017, Miettinen worked as the vice rector responsible for research, infrastructure and the Ä¢¹½Ö±²¥ Graduate School.
Pasi Raiskinmäki leads the university’s societal interaction, particularly in relation to partnerships, research cooperation and innovation activities as well as related work on continuous learning.
Pasi Raiskinmäki (PhD) has worked as the development director of research services at JYU since 2021. Before this, he worked at JAMK University of Applied Sciences. Raiskinmäki completed his doctoral degree here at JYU in the Department of Physics, and he has worked in the same department as well as at VTT as a researcher.
